This book, out of 55 I reviewed in 2022, was the title I chose as my wildlife book of the year – I recommend it highly. You can buy this book from Bookshop.org and I have set up a booklist to make that easy through this link https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/MarkAvery Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org…
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – Saving Eden by Kevin Corcoran
I hadn’t heard of The Gearagh until I received this book. I can be forgiven for that, perhaps, because it is in Ireland and essentially this superb site for wildlife was destroyed a few years before I was born, in the 1950s. This book describes what we lost and how we lost it. The Gearagh…
Published today – The Trespasser’s Companion by Nick Hayes
This is a follow-up to the same author’s Book of Trespass from 2020 – see review here – and just as I loved the first book I love this one too. Perhaps even more so. It’s a book with attitude, and I like that. I also agree with a great deal of it, although even…
Sunday book review – Thin Places by Kerri ni Dochartaigh
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This is another book published last year, which I missed even though I knew it was coming. If the name of the author rings a faint bell with readers of this blog then it is because she won a little writing competition held here in December 2016. This is an immensely powerful book. I couldn’t…
Sunday book review – When There Were Birds by Roy and Lesley Adkins
This book is described by its publisher, on the jacket flap, as a social history of Britain that charts the complex connections between birds and people, and in a way it is. But if it were that, I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it quite as much as I did. For me, this is…
Sunday book review – Wild City by Florence Wilkinson
There is wildlife everywhere and that includes our big cities, towns and villages. This shouldn’t come as a surprise really, but we are so wedded to the idea that our own activities are driving wildlife abundance down (as they are) that we, perhaps subconsciously, believe that built up areas must be the worst possible places…
Sunday book review – Tickets for The Ark by Rebecca Nesbit
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I think this is a good book and it ranges rather more widely than its extended title might suggest. The author picks up many issues connected with how we do nature conservation and why we do it in the way that we do. Much of the book is about values, and about the choices that…
Sunday book review – The Role of Birds in World War Two by Nicholas Milton.
I know Nicholas Milton from quite a long way back and I reviewed, favourably, a previous book of his, Neville Chamberlain’s Legacy, here. When I get one of Nicholas’s books I tend to think, ‘I wonder whether I’ll be interested in that’ but it seems that I always am, and I think that’s partly because…
Sunday book review – Elegy for a River by Tom Moorhouse.
This book was published last year but I missed it, and it is now, since Thursday, out in paperback so that’s my excuse to review it. I like it. It’s a book about Water Voles and their conservation and recovery, and about a biologist, the author, who has worked on that task for over a…
Sunday book review – The Birds are our Friends by Yessengali Raushanov
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This is an interesting book – a translation of a book by the Kazakh poet Yessengali Raushanov who died last year. The book is organised by species, over 30 species of bird, many of which are familiar to a UK audience, with a few extra bird-related essays included too. One learns something of the folklore,…